Designing Singaporeans: A Project in Identity Construction
In: Multiculturalism: Critical and Inter-Disciplinary PerspectivesSearch for other papers by Michael Kearney in
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With the increase in interaction between peoples of different ethnicities and cultural systems due to Advanced Information and Communication Systems (AICS), increasingly integrated global economic systems, and the mobility of labour/professionals, the concern over striking a balance between maintaining individuals’ traditional systems (customs, beliefs, ethics) and having a sense of belonging in multicultural settings has become more prevalent. Beyond legislation, which is essential in protecting the rights of individuals against racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination and intolerance, the concept of generating, through education and social programs, identities that can successfully navigate transcultural landscapes benevolently is a major issue that needs greater consideration. In this chapter, the multicultural city-state of Singapore’s practice of social engineering will be considered in order to discern its benefits, limitations, and demerits. The focus of the chapter will be on the conditions of the modern independent city-state of Singapore’s endeavour to engineer identity and regulate social behaviour so as to create from an ethnically diverse population (Chinese, Indian, Malay) Singaporeans in an attempt to secure order and progress. Fundamental to achieving the above are the government’s education policies, housing policies, and the government’s responses to incidents of ethnic/cultural tension. The government’s intent is to generate a sense of cohesion within the population through a Singaporean identity while promoting within each individual an adherence to their ethnic/cultural heritage, which will ground the individual and guard against the influence of non-Asian ethics and morals, and at the same time to advocate English proficiency and multicultural tolerance, which are held to be keys in attaining a solid position for Singapore in commerce and technology on a global level. The underlying theoretical mechanism utilized in this analysis is the Identity Matrixing Model (IMM), which provides a procedure to examine how identity is constituted through a layering process where culturally constructed systems are internalized by individuals in parallel vertical sets and transcultural horizontal sets. This research offers more than a case study of Singapore; it also demonstrates how the IMM can be applied as a methodology to multicultural issues.